Established in 1969, Manohar is a publishing house and a bookseller serving individuals and libraries. We export books by mail and have a bookstore at Ansari Road in Delhi.
Manohar initially sold only rare and out of print publications, but soon branched out into local sale/export of new books published in India, and then into publishing of scholarly works under its own imprint.

03 September, 2012

India and Southeast Asia: Strategic Convergence in
the Twenty- first Century

By- T. Nirmala Devi and Adluri Subramanyam Raju
(Eds.)

Southeast Asia and India are geographically
contiguous. They share common histories and colonial experiences. During their
freedom struggle and later, Southeast Asian countries expected India to support
them not only politically but also economically for their development. However,
due to various reasons including its preoccupation with domestic problems
arising from partition, inward – looking economy, the war with China and in
particular the Cold War divisions, India could not take interest in the region.
Some of the Southeast Asian countries did not support India when it had
conflict with China and Pakistan, which made New Delhi to maintain distance
with the region. Though efforts were made to evaluate the policy course, some
of the developments made both the entities to drift away from each other.

Disintegration of Soviet Union and India’s relation
with the US in the post- Cold War period has had a positive effect on
India-Southeast Asian relations. Both the entities recognize the importance of
each other. The Southeast Asian countries have begun to see India as an
economic power and have now become a major player in foreign direct investment
stakes in India.India is active in setting up regional economic and
development groupings like BIMSTEC and Mekong Ganga project. It also aims at
developing land connectivity with the region through Myanmar and Thailand. Both
India and Southeast Asian countries, as this timely volume shows, now
increasingly view each other in a more constructive way. The volume focuses on
various issues pertaining to relations between India and Southeast Asia.

T.
Nirmala Devi is the former Director of the Centre for
SAARC Studies, Andhra University Visakhapatnam. She was a Baden- Wurttemberg
Fellow at the South Asia Institute, University of Heidelberg, Germany.

Adluri
Subramanyam Raju is Associate Professor at the Centre for
South Asian Studies, Pondicherry University, Pondicherry. He was Salzburg
Seminar Fellow (2006) and the recipient of the Mahbub ul Haq Award (2003),
Kodikara Award (1998) from RCSS, Colombo, and Scholar of Peace Award (2002)
from WISCOMP, Delhi.

In 1857 the
Indian troops of the Bengal Army rose against their colonial masters. They were
quickly joined by tens of thousands of discontented civilians in what was to
become the bloodiest insurrection in the history of the British Empire.

For much of the
last century, Indian and British scholars downplayed the importance of
professional grievances in their accounts of why the military insurrection of
1857 took place. Most viewed the Bengal sepoys as uniformed peasants who were
affected by the same social, economic and religious concerns as their civilian
counterparts. They tended to identify the defence of caste and religion as the
key to the military uprising, while regarding the latter as little more than a
precursor to a general revolt. Yet this study’s identification of professional
concerns as the essential cause of the Indian Mutiny is very much in line with
the recent historiography of military revolts.

All armies have
grievances relating to conditions of service, particularly pay, career
prospects and relations with officers. What set a colonial force like the
Bengal Army apart is that it was a volunteer mercenary force officered by men
of a different race and religion. Its loyalty to its paymasters, therefore, was
entirely dependent on the incentives for service outweighing the disincentives.
David argues that by 1857 this was no longer the case: primarily because the
number and seriousness of the sepoys’ grievances was increasing, while the
Bengal Army’s control over its soldiers was weakening.

Saul David is Professor of War Studies at the University of Buckingham in the
UK, and the author of several critically-acclaimed books on the wars of the
Victorian period.